Pernell McPhee was back at the Baltimore Ravens training session on Thursday, and interestingly, he was there working with the team as part of the coaching staff. However, he was also there to mark perhaps the most important moment as a Raven.
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The franchise announced on August 13 that McPhee, a seven-year veteran with the Ravens, will be retiring. Former Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome was at the training camp along with McPhee’s former teammates Sam Koch, Jimmy Smith and Nick Boyle, to mark the special and emotional moment.
Newsome, who originally drafted McPhee as a linebacker in the 5th round of the 2011 NFL draft, fittingly spoke a few words to honour McPhee’s legacy at the franchise.
“I was thinking about it: how can I best talk about or describe?” said Newsome on footage recorded and posted to X by Jonas Schaffer. “And I came up with this: if I had a bulletin board and it says play like a Raven. Well, it would be a number of guys that would be on that billboard, but one of the first guys would be Pernell McPhee.”
“It’s probably one of the closest things to winning a Super Bowl … just being honored as a player,” McPhee said on The Lounge podcast. “You know, a lot of athletes don’t get that opportunity to go back to the organization where they started at, and actually retire there and get praised on doing that. And you know, it just make me smile inside, make my heart smile to just know that God don’t make no mistakes. He sent me to the right place around great people. And now I’m here and just thankful that I got that opportunity.”
McPhee’s first stint with the Ravens saw him win the Super Bowl XLVII championship in 2013, Baltimore’s second and last championship to date. In those four years, McPhee recorded 17 sacks, including a breakout season in 2014, tallying seven and a half sacks. That season established McPhee as one of the most successful developmental stories in Ravens’ history.
He played three years with the Bears and one year with the then-Washington Redskins. McPhee returned to Baltimore in 2019, recording 7 sacks from then till 2021.
While McPhee was never the most celebrated defender for the Ravens, his time at the Ravens, like Newsome said, is a testament to what it means to be a Raven. McPhee himself left a message for the current and future generation of players who don the purple helmet.
“When you look at me and when I play, it was very violent,” said McPhee in a video recorded and posted to X by Brian Wacker. “So the message I’m always leaving behind: If you’re a Raven and you’re on any side of the ball, you gotta be violent. You gotta be physically, you gotta have fun about doing it because that’s what we built on. Just being violent, being filthy, and playing, being a technician at every position.”
In the 92 regular-season games he played for the Ravens, McPhee recorded 159 total tackles. That, along with the 24 sacks he recorded, turned him into a dominant and versatile force that the Ravens deployed on their opponent countless times.
Ravens Flock will remember when McPhee helped deliver an epic double-overtime playoff win, pulling a clutch strip-sack on Peyton Manning to hold off the Denver Broncos in 2012. Right after that, he produced a vital pass deflection against Tom Brady in the AFC Championship Game. This run of clutch performances came en route to the Baltimore Ravens’ second Super Bowl crown.
McPhee has already transitioned to coaching, having spent the 2024 season with the Michigan Wolverines as a defensive support fast and graduate assistant before being named the outside linebacker and edge rushers coach in 2025.
For the 2026 Baltimore Ravens preseason, McPhee is part of the Bill Walsh Diversity Coaching Fellowship, which aims to bring coaches from diverse backgrounds to engage with players during training and preseason. He was a constant presence at the Ravens training camp.
McPhee’s name can soon become a familiar one in the world of coaching, and there is a good chance he takes up a role on the Ravens’ staff sometime in the near future.